Work In Progress

A Saga Of The Settling--and Constant Resettling--of The American West

January 02, 2000|By John Maxwell Hamilton. John Maxwell Hamilton, dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University, is author of the forthcoming "Casanova Was a Book Lover."

INTO THE WEST: The Story of Its People

By Walter Nugent

Knopf, 493 pages, $35

As American mythology would have it, rugged individualism won the West. The more complex reality, historian Walter Nugent explains in his epic "Into the West," is less cinematic but more interesting.

Beginning with the earliest pioneers, who may have come over the Bering Straits, waves of immigrants have rolled into the West from virtually everywhere on the planet. While these pioneers were often independent-minded, government homesteading laws and tax-dollar-supported irrigation schemes as much as anything pulled them into the region. Corporations, especially land-rich railroads, promoted development with aggressive, often misleading advertising. Many starry-eyed newcomers came with the misguided hope of picking up easy riches.

Gun-toting John Wayne types were minor players in this saga. In fact, Nugent argues, the West has had an exaggerated reputation for gun-toting and violence in its cowboy days and now, when there is so much news about militias in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. In 1920, he notes, "the leading seven states in homicide rates were not in the West but in the South."

Similarly, this land of horses and wide-open spaces has been a leader in the per capita use of automobiles and in urbanization. By 1880, 30 percent of the people in the mountain and Pacific states lived in cities, as opposed to 28 percent nationally.

We also wrongly remember the West as a man's world. "Women filed 10 to 20 percent of the claims on federal land in Colorado, either under Homestead or other laws, sometimes as individuals and sometimes to add to family holdings, and they succeeded about as well as men," Nugent points out in yet another counterintuitive observation.

Another phase in the feminization of the West occurred on the Pacific coast, which became the production center for the military-industrial complex. "Los Angeles had virtually every advantage for plane building, including experience and nearly year-round flying weather." But during World War II it also needed many more workers, and defense contractors recruited Rosie the Riveters by the thousands from other parts of the country.

Particularly important to Nugent's theme is the diverse mix of people who settled the West. The Statue of Liberty, our potent symbol of melting-pot America, could strike its beckoning pose as comfortably on the San Francisco waterfront as on New York's. In 1860, California had a higher percentage of foreign-born residents than states farther east. Newcomers "included Chinese, Irish, Germans, Hawaiians, Filipinos, Peruvians, African-Americans, Australians, Mexicans--more a cross section of the world than of the United States up to that time."

Nor was the interior of the West homogeneous even after the ethnic cleansing of the Indian population. There were Basques in Idaho and Scandinavians in the northern Plains. Blacks so eagerly joined in Oklahoma's land rushes that by 1901 the state had more African-Americans than European immigrants.

While gold and oil drew large numbers of people, instant riches were not nearly as important in winning the West as government homestead laws that required would-be owners to live on the land for a least five years to receive title. This approach stood in sharp contrast to the settlement of much of Latin America. There, a few privileged citizens received large landholdings by fiat of a distant Spanish king and typically did not live on their land, let alone develop it with their own hands. Latin American countries ended up with a society dramatically stratified between rich and poor. The 19th Century West nurtured a strong, entrepreneurial middle class.

Not that everyone prospered. Homesteading laws did not initially take into account that a family needed more land to farm in arid areas than in wet ones. Some lands should never have been farmed at all. More recently, mechanization has made the small family farm less economical. In a sort of reversion to the Latin American model, the 20th Century has seen the rise of large landholdings owned by impersonal agribusinesses.

Setbacks have occurred elsewhere as well--in Los Angeles, for instance, where blacks went seeking jobs and now are unemployed in large numbers, and in mining towns that have gone bust.

The West, as Nugent defines it, presents a vast panorama that includes the Pacific and mountain states plus the Great Plains, running from North Dakota to Texas. Toward the end of the book Nugent argues that Hawaii and Alaska also belong in the West. Mercifully, he does not develop the point.

The area, Nugent acknowledges, is too big for a unified history. His approach is to skip around, region by region, in what becomes a whistle-stop tour through history. With its heavy reliance on population statistics and its extensive quoting from settler diaries and memoirs, "Into the West" is a Ken Burns documentary without the music.

The book leaves a keen sense that the West has always been a work in progress. Although historians like Frederick Jackson Turner pronounced the frontier closed by 1890, people kept coming. The region grew almost twice as fast as the nation in the 1890s.

Constantly shifting patterns of development continue today with the internal migration of "modem cowboys," most supposedly from California, who run consulting businesses from their little ranches in Montana and Wyoming. Thanks to these new pioneers, property prices and general prosperity have rebounded in towns like Bozeman, Mont.

The West is becoming a truly multicultural society. Non-Hispanic whites, Hispanics, blacks and Asian-Americans are heading toward numerical parity with each other. Whether their socio-economic status will be on the same footing, Nugent suggests, is possibly the most important question about the quality of that future.